Record

Stable Baseline Record

One entry per completed increment, written at the point its checks have passed and before anything new is started. It answers the question you will actually ask in a crisis: which version of this did I last know worked, and what did "worked" mean?

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The record

Increment: What this piece of work was, in one line. The same wording you used when you described it, so the two can be matched up later.
Accepted behaviour verified: Which described behaviours you actually checked, not which ones exist. If something was described but not checked, it does not belong in this list.
Checks completed: How the verification was done and where the detail lives — a test record, an automated suite, a manual pass. A pointer, not a copy.
Known limitations: What is deliberately not handled yet, and anything accepted as imperfect. This is the field that stops a future session from treating a known gap as a new defect.
Version reference: The commit, tag or version this state corresponds to. Without it the rest of the entry describes a state you cannot get back to.
Safe to return to: Yes or no. No means the entry is a note rather than a baseline — useful history, but not somewhere to fall back to.
Next intended increment: One line. Written now, while the context is in your head, rather than reconstructed at the start of the next session.

A completed entry

Filled in for one increment of a small stock-management tool.

Increment: Allow a stock level to be adjusted up or down with a reason, from the item page.
Accepted behaviour verified: Adjustment form appears on the item page; a positive or negative adjustment updates the displayed level immediately; the reason is required and is shown in the item's history; an adjustment that would take the level below zero is rejected with a message and no change is made.
Checks completed: Manual pass against the seven acceptance checks recorded in the test record for this increment, including the two regression rows for the stock report and the low-stock warning. All passed after one correction.
Known limitations: No audit of who made the adjustment — deliberately deferred. Adjustments cannot be edited or reversed once saved; the intended approach is a second, opposite adjustment rather than an edit.
Version reference: Tagged baseline-stock-adjust on the main branch.
Safe to return to: Yes.
Next intended increment: Record which user made each adjustment and show it in the item history.

The running log

Entries accumulate into a short history, and the history is the part that earns the effort. It is what lets you find a verified point weeks later without reading commit messages and guessing.

One line per increment, most recent last.
Increment	Verified	Version	Safe	Known limitations
Item list and item page	3 Feb	baseline-items	Yes	No paging; fine below ~200 items
Stock adjustment with reason	5 Feb	baseline-stock-adjust	Yes	No audit of who; no reversal
Low-stock warning	6 Feb	baseline-low-stock	Yes	Threshold fixed at 5, not configurable
Supplier import	—	—	No	Started; column mapping unfinished

The last row is the one that does the work. It is honest that something is in progress and not verified, which is exactly what you need to know when you return on Monday and cannot remember where you stopped.

How this differs from the test record

The two operate at different levels and are meant to be used together.

The test record holds one row per acceptance check within a single increment: what was checked, what was expected, what happened. It is the evidence.

This record holds one entry per increment across the project: what was verified, which version it corresponds to, what is knowingly incomplete and whether you can return to it. It is the index over that evidence, and it carries the four things a test record has nowhere to put — the version reference, the accepted limitations, the safe-to-return judgement and what comes next.

If you only keep one of them, keep the test record while you are building and this one once a project has run long enough that you no longer remember every increment.